Airbrushes are commonly used by commercial artists and photographers for applying color and shading to drawings, prints and photographs, to accentuate highlights and to supply backgrounds to films. In the airbrush, which is often shaped like a pencil, compressed air from a nozzle is utilized to atomize paint in a controlled pattern. The nozzle operates by impinging high-velocity turbulent air on or across the surface of such paint causing it to collapse to droplets with a wide variety of sizes which are then directed onto a surface.
In a typical airbrush assembly, a bottle containing the color to be applied is connected to the airbrush. The bottle has an outlet hole through which the paint is aspirated by compressed air and an inlet hole into which air is drawn so that a vacuum in the bottle does not occur. A supply of compressed air is coupled to the airbrush and the compressed air passes through a small orifice adjacent the outlet hole. The flow of air draws the color material out of the bottle, due to the low pressure region across the outlet hole caused by the venturi effect, atomizes it into droplets and mixes it with the compressed air, and applies it to the surface being colored.
The prior art airbrush assemblies have, however, numerous drawbacks. For each different color or blend of color a different bottle had to be attached to the airbrush. This was time consuming and tedious and interrupted the flow of working with the airbrush. In addition, for adding black or white or a solvent, the airbrush had to be cleaned out and the white, black or solvent added as with any other color. Moreover, the outlet hole from the bottle had a tendency to become plugged during operation of the airbrush due to the viscosity of the color material. Finally, the air inlet hole would also become plugged with color pigment due to the color material being moved across the air inlet hole from the motion of the bottle during airbrushing.
Accordingly, it is a general object of the present invention to provide an improved airbrush assembly.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an airbrush assembly which utilizes a multiplicity of color materials without work interruption to change containers.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide an airbrush assembly in which the plugging of paint and air holes is minimized.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide an airbrush assembly which does not have to be cleaned out to add black, white or solvent materials.